I’m a visual person and as I’m writing I often find myself on Flickr or YouTube looking for images and footage that will help me write. Just yesterday I was researching Mount Nebo in Jordan, using people’s holiday snaps and amateur videos to help me describe the landscape and setting. So I appreciate our guest post today from author Kate Lord Brown who talks about an interesting way to use photographs to get the creative juices flowing.
How do you write?
Do you ‘see’ your story flickering like images from a whirring projector, gradually gaining clarity and focus as you hone your words, as characters and locations gain color?
If you write visually, the truth of the old saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ will ring true. There’s no better way to kick start a story than to immerse yourself in the world you are writing about, but if you can’t time travel back to the 1930s, or hop on a plane to Spain, photographs are the next best thing.
Thanks to the web, you have millions of images at your fingertips to flick through until you find something that resonates with you and your story.
Roland Barthes talked about the way particular images affect us – he called it ‘punctum’, how a photograph pierces your soul.
Each story starts with images for me.
In the olden days, I’d make mood boards, and hang them over my desk. Now, of course, we have Pinterest, and I made a board for The Perfume Garden. Why not give it a try, and make a board for the book you are working on? It’s a great reference for your work, and a way of sharing your research.
These images are a shorthand to the story. Each one is a point from which storylines grew, and interconnected. Creative daydreaming, or boondoggling as I prefer to call it, gives your mind permission to ramble and the story to grow – I think of it as feeding, and watering a garden. Amassing resonant images, music, perfumes enriches your reserves – it ‘fills the well’ as Julia Cameron famously said.
Choose one photograph
Perhaps you have a story in hand, or maybe you are searching for inspiration? Today, why don’t you choose just one photograph, and take a really good look at it? Ask yourself:
- What strikes you first?
- Step back – what is the photo of? What’s going on?
- Are there people in the photograph? What can you figure out about them? Imagine each person’s name, their life, what they do just after the photo is taken.
- What’s hidden in the photograph – is it posed, or natural? What thoughts or emotions are the people hiding?
- What’s not shown in the photo? What lies beyond the image – the weather, the temperature, the smells and noises?
Run with the image – write a thousand words about just one photograph.
Sometimes all you need is a single spark for a story or novel – for some it’s a character who comes to them fully formed, or a passage by another writer, or a snatch of music. For me it’s always an image – in the case of The Perfume Garden, it was Robert Capa’s famous image of the falling soldier, taken during the Spanish Civil War.
How to use your images
Once you’ve amassed your images, there are all kinds of things you can do with them too. I made my first book trailer the other day. The images used are all (creative commons/royalty free or my own), photos I’d used as prompts during the writing of the novel, and began with a few torn out images pinned to a board above my desk years ago (you can see the original board if you scroll down here to ‘beginnings’.)
Whether you are the kind of writer who likes to rip images out of magazines and pin them on a cork board, or one who’s happiest virtually ‘pinning’ with Pinterest, why not give it a go, and see where a single photo can take you – probably way beyond a thousand words.
How do you use images to help create your story?
‘The Perfume Garden’ by Kate Lord Brown is published by Atlanticon June 1st 2012.
Available at Amazon
More about Kate: www.katelordbrown.com
{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }
This is brilliant. I am a lot like this too. I love when a picture speaks to me.
Thank you for an interesting post that rang bells.
I recently used Pinterest to great effect as pinboards for my novels.
(http://pinterest.com/pruebatten) But interestingly it became even more helpful as I began compiling mood-boards within Pinterest. Finding Fantasy and Hoarding Hist.fict have proved tremendous help in feeding the muse because I tend to write visually. I can heartily recommend the technique. And in addition, Pinterest is defining me as a writer.
With respect to the booktrailer, I also made one in 2010 using Creative Commons images and music. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivQK4AAVZrc) But in truth, I think it did very little for all the effort. I think I’d rather stick with Pinterest for its variety and value unless I could afford to produce a movie-style booktrailer.
Good luck with the Perfume Garden.
Thanks, Ashley and Prue. It’s great to hear that so many of you are embracing Pinterest, and book trailers too. I agree it’s hard to quantify their effectiveness in terms of book sales, but I do think they are a great way to conjure up the mood of a story for yourself and readers.
I seen a picture of one of my fiction characters on a hair care product bag and I had to buy it. I never used the product, I just use it for the picture
I think having a physical picture for your characters will help your creativity a lot. Thanks for the post Joanna and Kate.
I love finding the right pics for my characters. I have an Egyptian guy in Exodus, my next book – and scoured the Egyptian pop charts for the right look
Such fun!
Hi Shaquanda – I love that! And yes, have done the same Joanna (in fact, *had* to amass photos of Javier Bardem for The Perfume Garden – a tough job, but someone has to do it:)
Being a highly visual person, I’m loving Pinterest. Am definitely using it to help draw attention to my upcoming book and garner interest in the research I am doing.
Having a book that’s on the world of chocolate, makes that all the easier! You can see the different kinds of chocolate boards I have created at http://pinterest.com/chocolatour/. Drop by for a taste!
Fantastic Doreen – I also love Pinterest but only as a concept right now. I just don’t have the bandwidth for another network, but I love the visual aspect of it.
The world of chocolate, Doreen – what’s not to love
Think these boards will appeal to people on so many levels.
I’ve recently started using Pictures more for my Blog. My aim is to use a picture I’ve taken for each of my Blog Posts. Some are quite good, and others not so, but each one is my own and helps tell my story
I also subscribe to an image saying a great deal. Reading is great, but pictures can help the mind wander, too
Matthew (Turndog Millionaire)
Hi Matthew – that’s great to use your own images. I love artist/writer sites when blogs really become a complete artwork that as you say tells an individual story.
I adore the idea of creating a pinterest board for visual ideas behind your story. How clever is that? NEVER considered it before. This post is quite brilliant, using images to spark creativity in our writing is something so many more of us should be trying. Thank you for writing this!
Hi Katie – great, do give it a whirl! Pinterest is a lot of fun, and as you start to follow people with similar interests and tastes, very inspiring
Awesome. A picture never fails to unleash my creativity! Your post totally resonates my thoughts Joanna.
Very interesting article. Most of my visualization process seems to involve characters talking, moving about, etc. That’s when I feel closest to them.
that’s cool – I don’t have an ‘audio track’ of my characters – perhaps you are more of an aural person than visual – we all have different preferred modes of engagement with the world.
Hi Thomas, that’s really interesting. Like Joanna, I tend to ‘see’ a silent film rather than hear the characters talking. I bet dialogue is a strength of yours?
Two things help me considerably. The first is an image of some kind that moves me in some way. I’m a visual person but by no means visually talented. I can’t draw to save my life. I can produce schematics but anything resembling reality is beyond me. That’s likely why I find it helpful. The second is music. I look for something that could act as the theme or overall sound track for what I’m writing to produce the mood that I’m looking for then let it drive my writing.
Hi Richard – absolutely with the music. I always have a playlist for each book to listen to while working, walking, running etc. It has a Pavlovian effect eventually that just keys you into the work.
For those others who like music with their writing, check out the Undercover Soundtrack with author Roz Morris. Authors share the music they write to.
http://mymemoriesofafuturelife.com/category/undercover-soundtrack/
I create a random image and random worded title and then think about what book goes between the covers. It’s like walking into a bookstore and pulling a book off the shelf. What characters will I find in there?
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